Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.
Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience, the poet, like an acrobat, climbs on rhyme to a high wire of his own making.
And the Blue Angels are coming back to scare the local population. I remember seeing old Vietnamese women ducking under the benches in Washington Square; they thought they were back in the war.
It's the story of an American who wants to become a dictator and goes to Europe with a sidekick to interview various Fascists to find out how the Nazis and Mussolini got into power.
Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately.
I think if there's a great depression there might be some hope.
The best writing is what's right in front of you. Sometimes I'd walk down the street with poets and they wouldn't see anything. I'd have to shake their arm and say, 'Look! Look!
Almost every truly creative being alienated & expatriated in his own country.
Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.
Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.
I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American.
It's much easier to consume the visual image than to read something.
Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.
The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it's the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it's a failure in communication.
We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn't have any money for lawyers.
I didn't know that painters and writers retired. They're like soldiers – they just fade away.
I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.
We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.
These are international criminals, and the spineless Democrats are doing nothing about it.
Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.
Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.
Think long thoughts in short sentences.
The future of publishing lies with the small and medium-sized presses, because the big publishers in New York are all part of huge conglomerates.
The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.
No, I didn't become disenchanted. I just couldn't paint like them.
They were looking for a stable, but we didn't have one. In fact, we weren't very stable ourselves.
If you're too open-minded; your brains will fall out.
Well, I didn't know how to draw very well back then, in the '40s and '50s.
Fuck Art, let's Dance!
Decide if a poem is a question or a declaration, a meditation or an outcry.
We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.
Anyone who saw Nagasaki would suddenly realize that they'd been kept in the dark by the United States government as to what atomic bombs can do.
Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.
The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all 'bottom line' editors; everything depends on the money.
Don't Let That Horse . . . from A Coney Island of the Mind.
I'd ban all automobiles from the central part of the city. You see, the automobile was just a passing fad. It's got to go. It's got to go a long way from here.
To say one is revolutionary is a little like saying one is a Zen Buddhist – if you say you are, you probably aren't.
I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn.
